Category: Visualize This

  • Visualize This: Class Size and Quality of Education. Your Turn

    Posted Nov 17, 2009 to Visualize This / 1 comment
    classroom
    Photo by Night Owl City

    Last week I posted some parallel coordinate plots that related SAT scores and class size. Now it's your turn to take a crack.

    You can find the data that I used (and more) from the National Center of Education Statistics. There's a link to download the data as an Excel file. You can find pupil/teacher ratios here.

    The two best entries each win a copy of David McCandless' The Visual Miscellaneum: A Colorful Guide to the World's Most Consequential Trivia as well as eternal glory on FlowingData. Yes. Eternal.
    Continue Reading

  • From the FlowingData Forums [June 10-16]

    Posted Jun 17, 2009 to Forums, Visualize This / Add your comment

    Visualize This (and win)

    This round of Visualize This is a fun one. We've got the Rambo kill chart, which shows well, a breakdown of kills in each of the four Rambo movies. It's surprisingly detailed with several cuts of the dataset like number of bad guys killed by Rambo with his shirt on and off, number of good guys killed by bad guys, number of people killed per minute, and several others.

    The problem is that the data is just in a table. Surely we can do better than that. Can you visualize this?

    Person with the best viz gets a copy of Darrell Huff's classic How to Lie with Statistics. Get your entry in by July 1. One entry per person.

    Cool Threads

    • Visual Ideological History of the US Supreme Court: Alex Lundry visualizes the last seven decades of ideologies of US Supreme Court judges. Interact through the years and split the data in several ways.
    • Visualizing Biological Data: VisualMOA is an information browser for the Microbial Online Analysis database. Is it useful without subject knowledge?
    • Processing vs. Flash: Both are heavily used for visualization on the Web, but both have their pros and cons. Processing is good for coding beginners. Flash loads quicker using vectors. Which one should you use?
    • Mapping SPAM and Sensornet Attackers: Using some heat mapping and Circos, Ben, a visualization beginner, is looking for some input.

  • 10 Visualizations for Number of Days to Pay Your Taxes

    Posted May 4, 2009 to Visualization, Visualize This / 10 comments

    10 Visualizations for Number of Days to Pay Your Taxes

    A couple weeks ago, FlowingData ran another Visualize This challenge. I posted a dataset on the number of days it takes the average person in each state to pay his or her taxes and asked you to visualize it. The number of days vary, because tax burden varies state-by-state. The day all taxes have been paid is dubbed Tax Freedom Day. Alaska has the earliest Tax Freedom Day while Connecticut has it last.

    Here are the interesting results you all came up with. Thanks to those who participated. Nice work all around. Continue Reading

  • Visualize This: Days Spent Working to Pay Taxes

    Posted Apr 16, 2009 to Visualize This / 8 comments


    Photo by velo_city

    It's time for another segment of Visualize This. For new readers, this is something I've been running every now and then where I post a dataset and we all put up our own visualizations. It runs for a couple of weeks and we end up with many different views of the data, some inspiration, and we learn something in the process.

    The Data

    About 28.2% of the average American's income goes towards taxes, which means the first 103 days of the year is to pay for government. At the end of these 103 days - April 13 - is Tax Freedom Day. However, because of varying state-by-state tax burdens and average incomes, Tax Freedom Day varies by state. Alaska, for example, has the earliest Tax Freedom Day (March 23) because it has low state and local taxes while Connecticut is last on April 30, because of "extraordinarily high federal income taxes." For this Visualize This we're looking at the number of days each state spends paying taxes this year (2009).

    Your Mission

    As with previous Visualize This segments, show us your best shot at visualizing the Tax Freedom Day data in this forum thread. I've put the data in an Excel spreadsheet that you can find at the bottom of the forum post. You are welcome to incorporate any other data too if you feel that it adds to the story.

    Map? Graphs? Both? Let's see what you've got. Oh, and most importantly, have fun. If you haven't registered a (free) forum account, you'll want to do that first.

    DEADLINE: April 30, 2009

    [Thanks, Alex]